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Why “bad?” Because killer headlines get more attention. And Buenos Aires, my new favorite city, deserves it. Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires is vibrant and colorful, upbeat and stylish. For the first time since I invested in a laptop small enough to carry, I mailed a half-dozen postcards to friends at home, and even added arrows for

Watch and listen as I get serenaded by a taxi-driving tango singer. Tango is an addictive dance, it’s not only the dance, it’s the music, the shoes, the personalities. One night during my tango pilgrimage to Buenos Aires, I left a milonga Zona Tango at the early hour of 2 am and stepped into a cab. My driver was a professional tango singer (many cab drivers in Buenos Aires are addicted milongueros, dancers who prefer the flexible hours so they can dance every

It’s not so much why go to Buenos Aires as why go home! Buenos Aires is filled with people who planned on staying for a couple of months, and just never got on that return flight (myself included). It’s a rare city that manages to make well-traveled people fall in love with it quickly. It might have touches of Paris in the buildings or Barcelona in the never-ending nightlife, but Buenos Aires is really a world of its own.
Famous for its steak, tango, and leather goods, the city is currently experiencing somewhat of a renaissance in art and music, with famous local club nights touring CNN and galleries popping up just about everywhere. While it’s worth visiting historical sights around town, one of the city’s big draws is that something new and exciting is always happening.
Come to Buenos Aires for its incredible diversity. Have cocktails in a Parisian mansion and eat a steak bigger than your head, or visit Hollywood and SoHo–Palermo, that is, and see how well a country can bounce back from an economic collapse. Just don’t expect to be at a dinner table before ten, or in a club or bar before two. And everything you heard about how beautiful and stylish the locals are? All true. Here are my tips for enjoying Buenos Aires as a local. –Whitney Weiss

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What to see: Chacarita Cemetery
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I’m not trying to be morbid. Chacarita Cemetery is a wonderful look at Argentina’s history and architecture, and a lot less crowded than Recoleta Cemetary, where Evita (Eva Peron) is buried, yet no less interesting. In fact, the cemetery is the largest in the whole country, a surprise because it’s hidden from the nearby neighborhood by unassuming walls.
Incredibly quiet compared to the din of the busy streets surrounding it, Chacarita is known as the National Cemetery. Its rows and rows of mausoleums house many prominent Argentine artists, actors, singers, and composers, including Alberto Castillo, the tango singer, novelist Osvaldo Soriano, and the actor Marcos Zucker. If you’re not quite sure where to go for your cultural and historic fix, this is an excellent location to begin.
Photo: BrianMKA
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

I graduated from college this past June and fled the country, is what I tell people I meet here in Buenos Aires.
The real story is slightly more nuanced, but when it comes down it, the statement is not untrue. The months between Northwestern’s late June graduation and my flight out of the country to Buenos Aires on September 15 were filled with hours upon hours of babysitting, supplemented with hours upon hours on LinkedIn and emailing in an attempt to secure any sort of paid writing prospects while down in Argentina. There was also the time I spent freaking out — in a good way — about my impending move and subsequent adventures, as well as in a bad way, silencing the proverbial nagging voice that arose occasionally to question what, really, did I think I was doing? Why wasn’t I just following The Plan and finding a salaried job in the U.S. with benefits? The Plan had been my plan for years, anyway.
When I think about it now (and perhaps it’s because I have spent so much time telling myself this over and over), I really did have sound reasons to hop down to the Southern Hemisphere and start a life, even a temporary life. If, as I decided at some point between junior and senior years, I really wanted to give this whole freelance/travel journalist thing a solid go it would make sense to live in a different country, and one where the cost of living is affordable at that. Additionally — and this was a big one — I had the blessing of my parents, whom I had somehow convinced this move and what I would make of it was all a good idea.
Today’s most popular scapegoat, the economy, also served as an excuse, as I watched intelligent, ambitious, done-all-the-right-things classmates struggle to find jobs for which I also would have been competing. Strength in numbers didn’t hurt either; I’m currently living in an apartment with two other Northwestern 2010 graduates who both independently came to the decision to move here. And then there’s the little network of other recent college grad expats we have developed, because once you start talking with people about where you are and what you are doing, it seems almost everyone knows of someone also living in this great city.
Perhaps we make ideal case study subjects for psychologist Jeffrey Arnett’s “emerging adulthood;” maybe we should have been interviewed for Robin Marantz Henig’s “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” in the New York Times Magazine for eschewing the traditional route and, as some might argue, putting off “real life.” (That article, like Google Voice, debuted at a highly opportune time, a couple weeks before I moved down here.) The thing is, people have been making decisions and trips like this for years. The mid-30-year-old manager at an Apple store in Miami we stopped into the day before our flight out, for example, told me his romanticized tale of being dropped off at the Obelisco in Buenos Aires with chump change and two suitcases, the start of a prosperous stint here, personally and monetarily speaking. None of these paths are objectively better or worse, I’ve come to decide, because it is all an individual decision. They’re just different.
We realize we are lucky to have — and have made — the opportunity to be living in Buenos Aires. That said, in no way are we cavorting around dropping pesos without a care. Even though I sometimes guilt myself for skipping out on a structured job my first year after graduating, I’ve realized in my first two weeks here that I still have a lot of “real life” and growing up to handle. We are all working, attempting to make our way in the world (or at least this city), in addition to adjusting to a new lifestyle, culture and language. It is all a challenge we are living for and relishing.

Follow Karina Martinez-Carter on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

It’s human nature to name things, so we had to come up with a name for what we turned around one day and discovered everyone else doing — Tweeting, Facebooking, YouTubing, Digging, Etsying, You-Name-It-ing, basically platforming the hell out of the internet as a way to participate in the new conversations within networks, cultures and communities. Social Media is the name we’ve given the new modes of communicating.
From Sept 20-24, 2010, Social Media Week will be happening in five cities — Bogota, Buenos Aires, L.A., Mexico City and Milan. (A choice of locations that seems at least as poetic as geographically rational). Following the format of the inaugural Social Media Week in 2009, each of the cities will host a week-long series of free-admission events that will include workshops, panels, performances and games designed to explore the subject of social media.
Participants in the ‘generator’ cities will carry the week’s narrative over their own business and personal networks, and because these are some hefty networks we’re talking about, millions of people will be participating at some point during the week.
And as we say in L.A., let’s cut to the chase: Every event will undoubtedly pose the question new media types have had to ask since Grok showed Mok a spark from two flints and Mok said, “It’s cool and all, but who’s going to pay for it?”
I met the producer for Social Media Week in Los Angeles, Erick Brownstein of The New Agency, through BlobLive, a series of open-mic nights for entrepreneurs that combine live presentations in front of an audience with Twitter and videostreams to expand the possibilities for their seedling projects.
Erick and his team, Wendy Walz and Dawn Sinko, demonstrating how a few capable people with good social networking skills can work wonders, have organized a program of more than 70 events for Social Media Week in L.A., including:
-A discussion of how customers connect with restaurants and other local businesses using social media, hosted by UrbanSpoon and Postling;
-a geo-location workshop hosted by Rob Reed (a.k.a. @MaxGladwell) a prominent sustainability blogger;
-shows at the renowned improv theater Upright Citizens Brigade that are based on Facebook profiles and txt msgs;
-a ‘Fandom’ event moderated by the legendary ‘fan-cademic’ Henry Jenkins and hosted by the Cimarron Group, which does community building for major Hollywood films;
-the virtual fundraising “Twelethon” which will raise money for the Inner City Arts in Los Angeles;
-and parties, it wouldn’t be social without parties, and lots of them. There’s a beach party. A skating party. MTV is hosting a premiere party for its new online series, The Buried Life. Whether you’re a Mad Man or a Roller Derby Doll, there will be a scene during Social Media Week for you.
I’m involved with several of the events for the week, including a workshop at USC to help aspiring science journalists improve their communication skills using improvisation, with NPR science reporter K.C. Cole, and Alan Alda, who will be teleconferencing from Stony Brook U. on Long Island. It is an extension of a program Alda has piloted with scientists at the Brookhaven National Lab. I’d be lying if I said I don’t have butterflies about following Alda’s act.
Social Media Week promises both an exploration of what we believe is possible, and a confrontation with the realities of the marketplace. It feels to me as if the vibe of the event will be more realistic than euphoric, less brag, more fact. We can’t afford another bubble. This is not a technology play. This isn’t the turn ‘em and burn ‘em game. This is about using the new tools to help bring about a fundamental and necessary shift in the way we interact with the world.
Mike Bonifer is the author of GameChangers — Improvisation for Business in the Networked World and the CEO of GameChangers LLC.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

I am not normally a theater critic. I should just say that right up front. But on this Labor Day, I thought it would be appropriate to write about a play I saw this summer. I was invited (by fellow Huffington Post blogger Michael Gene Sullivan) to a performance of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s recent production, POSIBILIDAD, or Death of the Worker a few weeks ago, and caught their performance in a local park. The play, written by Sullivan, is a brilliant work, combining tragedy and humor to make a very pointed argument for thinking outside the box on the state of Labor and jobs today.
The play is unabashedly Leftist, in the classic meaning of the term. It tells two parallel stories of factories facing shutdowns, and the possibilities open to them; one from modern-day San Francisco and one from a few years ago in Argentina, and it manages to link these two stories in a very personal way through the lead female character.
And yes, it has dialogue. It’s not a completely-silent “mime show,” as one might think from the thespian group’s moniker. It also has music, which is actually one of the high points of the show, as the musicians range over an enormous breadth of musical styles, varying from New Age to a telenovela soundtrack (and everything in between), seamlessly and perfectly on cue.
All around, the technical aspects of the show were equally impressive. The show I saw was performed outdoors, with a portable stage which was smallish but unbelievably versatile and ingenious in its use of the limited amount of space. The actors all played multiple roles, and the costumes were so good it seemed the cast was much larger than six people. The different characters were portrayed so well, in other words, by both the actors and their wardrobe changes, that it was hard to even recognize that the same actors were playing these very different roles.
As I said, the plot is a tale of Labor, where the workers are pitted against a boss who has sold out his family’s factory to a corporate master. In an only-in-San-Francisco twist, the boss is a dreadlocked peace-love-and-flowers type who (when it gets right down to it) truly only cares about his own creature comforts — and not so much about the workers turning out his hemp fiber clothing. This is not your 1930s mine owner, in other words, but a much more updated concept of the “big boss.” This provides many opportunities for comic relief, as well.
The show is a rollercoaster ride emotionally, as it does indeed have many very funny moments in it, but also tells the personal tragedy of one woman’s previous experience in the struggle of Argentine workers to take over a factory and keep it running when the capitalist owners try to shut it down (based on a true story). The action alternates back and forth between the South American story to the San Francisco factory, where the workers have — almost by accident — occupied the factory in order to keep it from being shut down. The pace of the plot does slow down a bit in the middle, as both these stories play out, but it picks up again to build to a rousing finish.
Towards the end, the play manages to even poke fun at the way Leftist movements sometimes can become victims of their own success, when it comes time for the workers to decide how to actually run the place. But the conclusion is definitely worth waiting for, although I won’t spoil things by saying any more.
I spoke with Sullivan after the show, and asked him what inspired him to write the play. He mentioned the story of the Bruckman Textile Mill in Buenos Aires (which is told within the play), and also of the Illinois workers who recently occupied the Republic Windows and Doors factory — just to get their severance pay. He expressed frustration with how this protest played out, since the workers were only trying to get the pay they were entitled to after their factory was shuttered — while the company moved the equipment to a newly-purchased non-unionized factory. “If the bosses can’t run the place when they’re making money, then they don’t deserve to run the place,” said Sullivan.
When asked what he was hoping to accomplish by writing the play, Sullivan said, “I think for me, what I want from the audience is to question themselves. So much of the American working class has a limited view of change. We struggle for a seat at the table, but we don’t realize we built the table, and no one else would be there without us. We shouldn’t be fighting for a seat at the table, we should be fighting for the table.” When I asked about the Argentinean story within the play, Sullivan responded, “Each year we try to create a show that is going to be challenging to the audience. Right now, we are trying to rebuild the economy. Central and South America has already gone through this,” and he pointed out that we should be learning from their example in how to take on the “corporate bastards.”
As I said at the beginning of this piece, I’m not a theatrical reviewer. If I was, I probably would have written this at the beginning of the S.F. Mime Troupe’s season, instead of at the end (there are only a few more scheduled performances of the show, in the next few weeks). But there’s a reason for highlighting the show today, on Labor Day. And that is that the show has been invited to take part in a large Union centenary effort next spring, as part of a national memorial movement for the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (which claimed 146 lives almost one hundred years ago, in a New York City sweatshop).
So, if you are a member of a Union (especially if you’re an officer or hold other clout with your Union), urge them to extend an invitation to the San Francisco Mime Troupe to perform POSIBILIDAD, or Death of the Worker. While the Troupe will be participating next spring, the details of where exactly they’ll be performing will depend on the invitations which are extended to them. And I heartily recommend the play, even though it’s not specifically about Union organizing in nature. Because I’m confident that any Union lucky enough to see this performance will enjoy the message nonetheless. Sullivan summed this message up as: “The job is not to make profit, but to make jobs.” Which, as it turns out, is an excellent way to wish everyone a “Happy Labor Day” this year as well.

[Further Information: Visit the San Francisco Mime Troupe website for more information on both the group and the play, including photos, complete schedule, and contact and booking information.]
[Full Disclosure: I was personally invited to attend this performance of POSIBILIDAD, or Death of the Worker by the playwright. It was a free show, where they asked the audience for donations at the end. To avoid any possible conflict of interest, I donated five bucks, which seemed to be about the average donation, from what I could see.]

Chris Weigant blogs at:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com